kfitz

Publishing Workflow vs Business Model

Cross-posted from the Knowledge Commons team blog.

A few days ago a colleague alerted me to a thread on Bluesky that raised serious questions about the PRC publishing model, or Publish-Review-Curate, which is in active exploration and development by a range of open access repositories and publishers, including the folks behind the PRC Alliance. I'm very invested in these explorations, and Knowledge Commons is actively working toward the development of an integrated PRCA workflow (where the A is for Assess, using repository and peer-review analytics to help authors report on the impact their work is having), so I immediately checked out that thread.

I found myself both unsettled and disappointed by what I found there. The thread is only available to logged-in users, so I'm not going to link to it, but this was my response, which can lead you to the original thread.

The majority of what disappointed me was the broad denunciation of PRC as a "damaging" workflow without any consideration for the various contexts in which it's being deployed. A brief digression on PRC, for anyone unfamiliar with it: the basic idea is that publication, rather than being restricted to those outputs that make it through the peer review process, is instead moved to the front of the flow, through deposit to an open repository or pre-print server. Review then follows, and may or may not include revision of the deposited output. The third stage, curation, allows reviewed outputs to be gathered into overlay journals or edited volumes to further their dissemination.

The Bluesky thread took me back to all those arguments made about the problems with OA publishing, including that OA publications all rely on APCs, or article processing charges. APCs, as I have discussed at length elsewhere, have created real hindrances to open publishing for underfunded fields, institutions, and parts of the world, and have thus not only re-created but amplified the inequities in scholarly communication -- but it is simply not true that all OA publications rely on APCs. There are numerous "platinum" or "diamond" OA publishers -- including our good friends at the Open Library of the Humanities and Open Book Publishers -- that have developed new business models that do not require fees either to read or to publish.

Those publishers demonstrate the key distinction: OA is a publishing model. APCs are a business model. Publishing models and business models are often related, but they are not the same, nor even mutually determining.

We need to bear this in mind when we discuss PRC as well: the original poster was highly concerned because he saw organizations -- though he did not share who when I asked -- proposing that "authors pay for peer review," thus undermining the very important work being shared through pre-print servers and other repositories by turning it into an opportunity for monetization and by excluding those who cannot pay from the benefits of an "elitist" system designed to promote the work of those who can pay.

I hope it's clear from my prior work that I'd be appalled to find myself working toward a new system of publishing that further undermined the opportunities for full participation in knowledge development and sharing for those who have long experienced such exclusions. But I am convinced that I am not -- and further, that PRC has the real potential to rectify those inequities, by allowing free and open publication in repositories like KCWorks tied to community review platforms and processes like that provided by our own Pilcrow, allowing scholars, researchers, and practitioners of all stripes to break free of conventional journal publishing processes and instead build their own community-derived practices for research publishing, review, and curation.

PRC is a workflow, not a business model. We should resist the bad business models and the rent-seeking entities that deploy them -- but we must seize control of the workflows and make them sources of equity rather than exclusion.

This determination is precisely why Knowledge Commons needs your support -- to ensure that we can keep all of our workflows open for all.

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